


See Without Looking

by charlottechill



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Queer Character, Canon Queer Character of Color, Immortals, M/M, Post-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:41:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26097286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlottechill/pseuds/charlottechill
Summary: “One great benefit of Islam,” Joe said, “is the prohibition against representing people in art.” He said it while staring at a work in a gallery in Paris that specialized in lesser known 18th- and 19th-century painters, and only having lived for a millennium dulled the pain of what he was going to do.“What do you—damn.”--OR--Joe finds a 19th-century painting while palling around with Nile in Paris.
Relationships: Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 36
Kudos: 404





	See Without Looking

**Author's Note:**

> My sincere thanks to Robin Winter, for making Joe sound so smart about painting--because I am very much not.

“One great benefit of Islam,” Joe said, “is the prohibition against representing people in art.” He said it while staring at a work in a gallery in Paris that specialized in lesser known 18th- and 19th-century painters, and only having lived for a millennium dulled the pain of what he was going to do. 

“What do you—damn.” 

Nile’s response wasn’t unexpected. In the few months she’d been with them, she’d used that word in that tone so many times for so many things, it was driving a new furrow into the creases of Joe’s brain. He rolled his neck, let the annoyance slide away; in forty or fifty years, she’d have forgotten the meaningless idioms of this decade and become more of whomever she would grow to be. 

Or she’d keep saying “ _dayam!”_ that way like Nicky had said “destiny” for almost eight hundred years, and Joe would come to accept it. 

Nile tilted her head. “That’s… are you sure it’s him? I mean, maybe it’s just somebody who looked like him.”

It was Nicolo, from the mole on his jaw and the other on his hip, to the three freckles on his throat and the curve of his shoulder, to the length of his leg and the shape of his toes. Though he was captured in oils through eyes of an artist rather than on film through the lens of a camera, the artist had committed three feet of canvas to Nicky. “It’s him.”

Nile stepped closer to the painting and examined Nicky’s image far more closely than he’d ever seen her examine his beloved’s body. “Did you know he’d posed for this?” 

Joe nodded. “We’ve done many things, over the course of our lives. Posing on a couch for a painter in exchange for a few baiocchi was easy money. In that era, in that province, few men would do it.” 

Nile snorted, a sound worthy of Andromache. “I’ll bet.” She looked up at him. “So where were you? When he was doing that?” 

Joe stepped closer to the piece, ignoring the throat-clearing of the gallery manager to squint at the artist’s signature and date. “1804. I thought we were still in America, fighting with the natives.”

“Hey!” Nile shoved him on the shoulder and he stumbled, turned to glare at her. But she was already glaring at him, albeit trying to control herself, her fists clenched by her thighs and weight balanced forward. She would be exceedingly impressive, one day. 

“You guys helped kill off Native Americans?”

He cast a quick look over at the gallery manager, who still stared their way. “Keep your fucking voice down!” He waved over the elegantly dressed Parisian with her bleached blonde, black-tipped hair before she called the police on the ruffians jostling near her precious inventory. “We fought often on the side of your indigenous peoples against Europeans. And every other continent’s indigenous peoples. And we have warred on the side of conquerors, just as you have.” He turned back to the painting before the manager reached them.

The woman stopped four feet away. “May I help you?” She asked, looking down her nose at him from her perch on unreasonable heels and a presumption of superiority. 

“Oui.” He pointed and shifted into French. “How much for this one?”

“It is a Jules Grigori. Best known for his bold handling of paint surfaces echoing the immediacy found in Constable's field studies. His works have increased in value over the last thirty years,” she said, but she offered nothing else and made no move to fetch the information.

Joe raised his eyebrows. “You want me to guess the price?” 

“It is just…” she hid her arrogance better than he’d expected her to; everything he wore except his rings might not cost sixty euros. Nile was dressed even more casually, in nylon running pants that carried a broad stripe down the leg. “The piece,” the manager finally continued, “is an investment.”

Joe smirked at Nile. “She says it’s expensive. I think she believes this gallery is special.” 

“You are Americans?” 

Her accent was mild and she knew she’d been insulted, so for Nile’s sake he returned to English. “It's not his best work. Grigori sketched this. It has the vigor of the moment, but the artist himself knew that the foot and ankle were out of drawing. You can see the unfinished repainting in this section that betrays it was a piece he never considered worth revisiting,” he said, gesturing at the inconsistent strokes, never completed to flow with the rest of the work. “He was right. The artist is always right.

“And someone should have located a suitable frame, not this feeble attempt at distraction, because this one is as original as your hair color. Don’t mistake me for a dilettante. I’ve passed over better examples of Grigori’s work in Milan. It’s just,” he turned back to the piece and stroked his beard, “this subject interests me.”

Nile snorted.

The woman pretended to conceal a scowl. “Oui bien sûr, monsieur.” she said. “Un moment.” She walked back to her desk and a catalog that hid an iPad. 

Nile whispered, “Damn. You checked her at the door.” 

Joe shrugged. “She’s quick to judge. Many people are.” 

Nile went back to studying the painting. “I thought artists like this were supposed to make their subjects look better than real life.” 

Joe blinked. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest. “I dunno. I just… Nicky’s fine, and the painter made him look a little scrawny. Waif-ish.” 

Her study was so intent that she didn’t realize Joe wasn’t answering, was in fact waiting for her to notice and look at him. When she did, he tried to look disapproving. “Nicky’s body is indeed very ‘fine,’ I know. I didn’t think you knew.” 

She made a face. “I was in the Marines for over four years, man. That’s nine guys for every woman. If you don’t learn to size men up like you’re not looking, they think you want to get laid. You feel me?” 

He didn’t. “Nicky loves beauty. I know when he is looking.”

Nile made a sour face. “No, Joe, don’t tell me that. You two have this shield-brothers vibe, all romantic and attached at the hip and shit. Do not tell me you two go off on the side.” 

Joe returned his eyes to the painting and shook his head. He would tell her nothing of the sort. “No. Nicolo is…” chaste was the wrong word. Nile wouldn’t understand, any more than she would understand how little relevance her morals had on what he and Nicky shared. “He is very loyal. I meant that I know when he admires something. That Andy hides nothing about her tastes or her habits, and will return from her hunts stinking of women or men without a care. Booker’s focus was more often on the bottom of whiskey bottles.”

“So?”

“So, I haven’t noticed that you look without looking. Nicky says I can be hard for others to read, as well. I don’t see it.” 

The manager returned with a price and, after a little haggling, he paid the fourteen thousand with Booker’s black card. It was the least he could do to make the asshole feel less alone. 

The manager’s attitude had shifted profoundly when presented with the black card. “Monsieur Booker? Where shall I have your new possession delivered?” 

Joe shook his head. “I’ll take it with me.” 

She blinked a few times, all judgment kept to herself. It was wrapped and a wooden box-handle affixed to the package by the time Nile became bored. 

They left the gallery and stood for a moment on the street, where the air was cool and the sun was warm.

“You wanna take that back to the apartment?” Nile asked. 

He shook his head. It was nothing compared to tac gear, blades, water and weapons. “No. We can keep going.” They walked for another couple of hours, he carrying the painting while she discovered the quiet parks and shops and streets of the 18th district of Paris and parts east. It was all new to her.

It had been a very long time since he’d examined a city without remembering destruction rained upon it by wars past, or thinking that what stood today would fall tomorrow, or the day or the century after that. She was very refreshing. 

“You should take Nicky to the top of the Eiffel Tower tomorrow,” he said. “He hasn’t been there—shit, I don’t know if he’s been there since the war.” 

“Which war—no, don’t tell me,” Nile said. Her teeth flashed bright in a wide smile. 

He smiled back. She’d be lucky if she held onto this feeling for a century. Two, perhaps, if Booker returned a better man than he’d been when they sent him away. But it was late spring in Paris, a city whose history was writ large in its buildings and on its boulevards, because it had so far avoided modern war. This was not a time for dark thoughts. 

# 

They returned to the apartment in Issy-les-Moulineaux, an old thick-walled third-floor walk up not far from the Botanic Garden, late in the afternoon.

Nicky was back; the rich smell of oregano, cumin and lamb drifted into the small sitting room. Joe leaned the painting against a wall and went to the kitchen, peering over Nicky’s shoulder to examine the ingredients: steamed chard leaves, rice, a bowl of minced meat. 

“You’re making sarma?”

“If you’re helping. Otherwise it’s a Turkish stir-fry.” 

He nodded. “That’s fair. Where’s Andy?”

Nicky smiled at him. “She found a tall German who piqued her interest.”

“Ah. So now she’s piquing him?”

The smile disappeared, replaced by a look that might have signaled distaste or mild indigestion. “I try not to imagine. She promised to be back for dinner.”

Joe sighed. Andy had never been a woman who returned for family meals, or shared a room for no reason. But she had never been able to estimate the remaining days of her life before. Ten thousand perhaps, if she gave up this work—which she would not. A thousand, maybe fifteen hundred if they were lucky and cautious. Everything changed. 

Nicky caught his hand and laced their fingers, squeezing tightly. They looked at each other with no need to speak. That they had been reborn together might mean something and it might not. Either of them could be wounded tomorrow, and die before Andy. The other could live for millennia alone. The hope that they would die on a battlefield together was only that: hope. 

“Nile and I found something today,” he told Nicky. “A surprise. I’ll share it with everyone after dinner.” 

“I look forward to it.” 

#

Andy did return. They made sarma together at the counter, teaching Nile, bumping elbows. They reminded each other of past failed food preparations, because Andy had been a warrior first, then a queen and then a god. She needed an open fire and her guests a ravenous appetite for her efforts at cooking to earn any praise. 

They ate. 

They drank. 

They laughed. 

Joe grabbed the painting and a steak knife from the table to cut away string and paper. “I bring you—dessert,” he said, and with a flourish he turned the frame around to reveal the painting. 

Nicky laughed and clapped his hands. “I remember this man! Very lewd,” he said, flirtatious. “Wanted closer looks and better light and was shocked when I pretended affront and said I was no sodomite. He doubled my payment to keep me quiet.” 

Joe snickered. “I remember him now. How is it I never saw the painting?” 

“You thought him a pig and wanted no part of him.” 

“That sounds like me. Well, you are very alluring, very handsome. He wasn’t all bad.” 

Andy looked from the painting to Nicky and back a few times, measuring, and shrugged. “Too handsome, in my opinion. Better than the real thing.” 

Nile squinted at the painting again, then openly examined Nicky. “I still don’t think he did you justice, Nicky.”

Nicky smiled softly at their newest member, his lips closed, his eyes warm.“You are too kind.” 

“I’m beginning to think Nile sees you through a haze of affection,” Joe teased. 

“Yeah, right,” Nile scoffed. “I look at you, too. I look at Andy.”

“Equal opportunity woman,” Andy said, piling on. “I can appreciate that.”

Nile pushed back her plate and stared at the table, flustered. “You know what?” she groused. “All three of you suck.” 

Joe opened his mouth to agree and fluster her further, but Nicky intervened, changing the subject and offering more wine. 

They stayed up late, finished the bottle, and waggled fingers at Nile in the way she did to them when she said goodnight. 

Left together, the three of them, Andy glanced over at the painting where it was propped against a wall. “Maybe you should keep it. Stick it in the mine.” 

Joe said nothing. The suggestion was ridiculous, but Andromache the Scythian was of sound mind. He waited for Nicky to work out the matter. 

“Andy,” Nicky said after a moment. “Joe and I have been together for almost nine hundred years. I know every hair, every pore on his body. Every line of his smile, the color of his eyes in every light. Likewise, Joe says that my eyes are the color of the underside of a poppy leaf in the early morning. He no more needs an image of me to remind him than I need of him.”

Andy glanced around the room. “Colors change. The light changes, with time. A volcanic eruption in Russia took half of the blues from the sky around four thousand years ago. Today it’s electric lights and smog.” She held her hand in front of her, stared at it for a long moment. “I have no memory of my mother, my sisters, my first lover. I couldn’t pick out the exact color of Quynh’s cheek, and that was just a few hundred years ago. You might want a piece of memory left behind.” 

“Not if it’s a piece of my Nicolo,” Joe said. 

She glanced between them, her face like stone. “Easy to say now.” 

Nicky glanced at the painting and then up to Joe, a thoughtful look on his quiet face. “It isn’t the vessel—beautiful as it is—that defines my feelings for Joe. And those feelings will not die until I do. No matter what else happens in my life.”

Joe smiled, moved as always. “Agreed. But if a time comes when I’m without him and the world changes like you say, my memory will only make him more perfect. More himself.”

“Jesus.” Andy rolled her eyes. “I’ll sleep out here.” 

Nicky smiled, a tiny thing on his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. 

Joe nodded. 

“I am not inspired to love by seeing my own naked self, Andy,” Nicky said. “Come to bed.” 

She made reluctant noises, but she let them convince her to follow them to the master room. Nicky and Joe removed belts and shoes and stretched out on their bed and Andy dropped onto the small cot that they’d pushed into the corner. Joe waited for Nicky to beat his pillow into proper shape and settle his head before sliding in behind him and wrapping an arm around his chest, listening to Andy shift and turn and, eventually, begin to snore. 

Too few nights like these left. Joe wanted to remember their number. 

He destroyed the painting the next day while Nicky went with Nile to the Eiffel, shredding it carefully into thin strips and then setting it on fire, watching it burn to ash. 

When Nile asked him where he’d put it, he said, “Safely where it should be.” 

Time would harden her soon enough.

**Author's Note:**

> baiocchi = coin of the realm in that region at that time
> 
> Comments and feedback/critique welcome.


End file.
